Harvesting Fertile Ground’s best bets.

Navigating the annual Fertile Ground festival can feel
like cultivating a phenomenally overgrown garden. There are a few things
you want (kale, raspberries, butterflies), but also many you don’t
(weeds, slugs, all that extra zucchini). That’s the thing about the
11-day spree of new local works: Because it’s an uncurated festival,
anyone can mount a show. Presenters range from some of the city’s bigger
theater and dance companies to troupes that disappear once the fest
closes. The result is a dizzying range in style, subject and, well,
quality. Still, at only $50 for an unlimited festival pass (events are
also individually ticketed), you learn to deal with some mealy tomatoes
alongside the perfect plums. Among the fully staged world premieres,
workshop productions and stripped-down readings—there are more than 50
events this year—here are a few worth checking out. For more, turn to
Performance listings.

The Monster-Builder

Amy Freed isn’t worried about calling her new play a screed. A comedy about a megalomaniacal architect, Freed likens The Monster-Builder to “an exaggerated political cartoon.” That very hyperbole, Freed hopes, will spur impassioned conversation among the audience.

“The public nature of architecture gives that aesthetic
plenty of room to voice its opinion,” says the playwright, whose 1998
dark comedy Freedomland was a Pulitzer finalist. “Its existence
is its opinion. Most of us are fed in and out of these urban systems
that are so much bigger than we are. I wasn’t worried about being too
nuanced because the dialogue is so one-sided already.”

In the absence of nuance, The Monster-Builder introduces
us to an architect named Gregor Zubrowski, an eccentric Faustian madman
intent on destroying a beloved building and erecting an 80-story tower
capped with golden spikes. As a child, Freed had some exposure to this
world—her dad was an architect for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the
major modernist firm behind the Hancock Center and the Sears Tower. (The
family’s own home, meanwhile, was a “falling-down version of a Frank
Lloyd Wright house.”) She grew up observing the way the clean lines of
modernism—the “less is more” philosophy of architects like Mies van der
Rohe—mutated into the vulgar ornamentation of postmodernism (for a
sterling example, look no further than this city’s much-maligned
Portland Building). More recently, the San Francisco resident has seen
the way gleaming mega-developments have gone up there.

“We seem to have failed at figuring out what is an
enduring and successful direction for big buildings,” Freed says. “These
are places that have very little sense of dignity or control.”

The Monster-Builder, which begins previews Tuesday,
Jan. 28, and opens Saturday, Feb. 1, is Freed’s way of voicing her
strident opposition. And Portland, she says, is an ideal place for the
play’s premiere, precisely because such glass-and-steel skyscrapers
haven’t begun to rise here. “Portland’s reputation for livability is
part and parcel of the architectural containment,” she says. “You should
be wary when the dark pall that’s been cast over San Francisco starts
looking your way.” REBECCA JACOBSON. Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515
SW Morrison St., 241-1278. 7:30 pm Wednesdays-Sundays and 2 pm Sundays,
Jan. 28-March 2. $25-$55.

American King Umps

Don Wilson Glenn’s grandmother used to tell him stories
about Umps. Umps was Glenn’s great-great-grandfather, who’d been born
into slavery in Arkansas in 1834. Emancipated in Texas after the Civil
War, Umps gained legendary status in the family’s folklore: According to
a particularly apocryphal story, he once played the fiddle all day and
night to escape a beating by his master. Glenn, who was born in east
Texas and returned there from New York to care for his bard of a
grandmother—she’s now 109 and in “wonderful condition,” Glenn
says—always saw Umps as a heroic character.

For Glenn’s new play,
he has fictionalized Umps and placed him in a tale of
self-determination and triumph. Like his earlier play American Menu, which takes place after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., American King Umps
paints a personal story against a broader historical backdrop. Here,
the end of the Civil War is imminent, and a slave master has abandoned
his cotton plantation in Texas. The slaves, left to govern themselves,
disagree whether they should remain in America or return to Africa.
Glenn describes the play as high comedy—he balked at the idea of writing
anything too bleak—mingled with elements of Elizabethan theater. While
reading slave narratives, he uncovered threads that reminded him of
Shakespeare, so the new play draws on both The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The plot is inflected with starstruck romance, confused identities and the mysticism of nature.

“As the play moves into the nighttime, you have these
characters running around like ghosts,” Glenn says. “As time progresses,
things become a bit more mysterious and a bit cloudier onstage, but by
the end it unfolds itself as all the classic Shakespearean plays do to
reveal the mysteries of what’s going on.” REBECCA JACOBSON. Ethos/IFCC, 5340 N Interstate Ave., 283-8467. 7 pm Thursdays-Saturdays and 3 pm Sundays, Jan. 30-Feb. 16. $10-$20.

Picture Sentence Picture

Picture Sentence Picture—aside from being the format for all BuzzFeed articles—is a game. It’s a cross between telephone and Pictionary that, before Cards Against Humanity,
was the preferred activity for any group of people baked out of their
minds. To play, one person writes a sentence on a sheet of paper and
passes it to the next person, who draws a picture based on the sentence.
That person then passes it to the next player, who writes another
sentence based on the drawing, and so on—all hopefully to hilarious
effect.

Members of dance
company TriptheDark, known for its casual, non-captive shows in bars,
played this game on a weekend trip in May to Rockaway Beach, during
which the Jameson and white wine flowed freely. When the trip was over,
co-founders Corinn deWaard and Stephanie Seaman revealed to the group a
surprise: The game would be the inspiration for their newest dance
piece, which premieres at the Analog Cafe on Sunday, Feb. 2.

The pictures and sentences—things like, “The ghost took
over the earth, and the Kool-Aid Man was sad”—are interpreted through
the lens of yet another inspiration, a short story by Portland author
Andrew Dickson. It’s only 242 words and read at the beginning of the
show, but the tale about hedge-fund managers and doppelgängers is so
convoluted it’s impossible to follow. So when the six dancers, wearing
neckties and white masks, enact the storyalongside
drunken conjurings like the Kool-Aid Man, the audience is bound to get
lost. That’s OK, Seaman says, because “interpretation is what it’s all
about.”